FIELD OF THE INVENTION
The present invention concerns a process and an apparatus for the lifting and carriage of objects placed on traylike supports and more particular, even if not exclusively, it concerns a process and an apparatus for the lifting and the carriage of objects constituted by fruits such as apples, oranges or others, or objects having essentially similar shape, placed on tray supports, in which in particular the objects can have a pre-arranged position, in way that each tray support loaded with the present number of objects is lifted and inserted into a box-shaped container open in the upper section, for the packaging of said objects.
We already know the technique of packaging objects, in particular fruits of relatively large size and relatively regular shape, placing them tidily into containers made of cardboard, wood, plastic or the like, which are open in their upper section to allow the loading of the objects and then can be closed by a lid to obtain a package ready for storage and carriage. Inside each container the objects or fruits are arranged in subsequent layers, each separated from the underlying one by means of a tray which holds the objects or fruits, for instance, in predetermined seats provided in the tray itself. Said trays are generally very thin and made of a very scarcely resistant material, such as polystyrene, wood pulp, chemical pulp, paper or similar, and are preferably arranged inside the container in a way that hollow and full spaces alternate in the subsequent layers for better utilization of the space.
The problem which the present invention proposes to solve is the lifting of said very scarcely resistant, easily breakable and often also very flexible trays already bearing the relatively heavy objects or fruits in the seats provided in the same, and their introduction into the box-shaped container, keeping carefully in mind that often the shape and the size of the tray-like supports are equal to the shapes and size of the internal section of the containers, in order to avoid undesirable shiftings of the trays and therefore of the objects or fruits inside the containers during the handling of same.
Up to now this loading operation has practically been performed manually with the help of particularly skilled operators, in that the question is to rapidly move the trays loaded with fruits or objects from a feed area as far as the inside of a box-shaped container, without causing breakings or bendings of the trays, which would cause losses of the objects or fruits, and therefore with a relatively high speed, but also controlling said speed in order to avoid that the objects or fruits come out from the seats provided in the trays and therefore may be lost or somewhat damaged. Furthermore it is necessary that each tray is put into the container with a certain care in order to avoid to damage the objects or fruits already present in the container itself.
A device for lifting and carrying single objects or fruits by means of feeding suckers, each operating on a single object or fruit, is already known. In particular, this system is used for the loading of the aforementioned trays. On the contrary the system cannot be used for the lifting and the carriage of the already filled trays into the boxes or the packing containers in that, as already mentioned, the trays are put in alternate positions, layer after layer, and therefore a rotation by 180 of the whole plant would be necessary. Furthermore, in this way, means for the lifting of the trays are not foreseen and finally there is always the problem that said sucking devices cannot lift a particular object or fruit due to the configuration of the same, inconvenience which is manually avoidable when trays have to be filled, but not equally avoidable when packaging boxes with full trays have to be loaded.